Wah! Wah! Girls: Bollywood bursts into the East End

A new stage musical entitled Wah! Wah! Girls brings the pulsating charm of
Indian films to the heart of London, says Laura Thompson.

Wah factor: "The feet, the upper torso, the head – they are all saying different things"

By Laura Thompson

6:35AM BST 09 May 2012

Later this month, Bollywood comes to Britain, when a musical entitled Wah! Wah! Girls brings the high-octane spectacle of Indian films to the stage. In itself, this is not a new idea: 10 years ago Andrew Lloyd Webber did it with Bombay Dreams. What makes Wah! Wah! Girls different, and potentially very exciting, is that it is set not in India, but in the London of 2012.

Whereas Bollywood is defined by a look of opulence and lavish shimmer, this show takes place in the East End, complete with onstage corner shop. Its cast of 14, mostly British Asians, also has a role for that familiar London figure, the Polish handyman.

At the heart of the show is a love story, but more tellingly there is a confrontation between old India – as symbolised by the traditions of mujra, a sensuous dance dating back to the Mughal era – and the new generation that has grown up with modern Bollywood and a more Westernised “street” attitude. This culture clash is played out directly through two powerful female roles, and the result might just bring real meaning to overused labels such as “diverse” and “vibrant”.

More importantly, it should make for a cracking piece of theatre. The richly collaborative show is written by Tanika Gupta, and its score interweaves familiar Bollywood songs – “item numbers”, as the parlance has it – with a new score by Niraj Chag.

Then there are the two choreographers, who first met on a dance floor at a wedding in Florence. Gauri Sharma Tripathi, a Southbank Centre artist-in-residence who has worked with Akram Khan, is a highly distinguished exponent of the ancient dance form kathak. Javed Sanadi, who made a great hit as one of the “professionals” in the Indian version of Strictly Come Dancing, is renowned for his work in the Bollywood style (and indeed choreographed the glamorous Florentine wedding at which he met Tripathi).

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These apparently dissimilar dance worlds are not, in truth, so far apart. Bollywood today may have become brasher, flasher and more highly edited (an excellent way to hide any dancing flaws). Yet its origins go right back to the Mahabharata, to folk theatre and to classical styles such as kathak, which in turn influenced the court dancing of mujra. It is, as Sanadi says, “like a family tree. So many branches, of all the styles that have been taken on and adapted.”

On a trip to Mumbai, to see the very early stages of rehearsal, I get a brief and intoxicating sense of this breadth of heritage. Mumbai (or, as its inhabitants call it, Bombay – don’t tell the BBC), has of course become a home to emblems of capitalism, in the form of mammoth skyscrapers and a glistening new road bridge that extends into the Arabian Sea. Yet in a pretty house on the outskirts of the city, the mysteries of old India are on mesmerising display.

Tripathi’s mother, Padma Sharma, is a legendary figure in the world of kathak. For a few unforgettable minutes she gives a masterclass, dancing barefoot to the rhythm of her daughter’s chanting as her small audience – Sanadi, four young dancers and me – watch enraptured. What is extraordinary is the way that the lower body remains rooted, stamping and swaying, while the hands and head make small, immaculate gestures of amazing expressiveness. “The feet, the upper torso, the head – they are all saying different things,” says Tripathi.

It is easy to see how all roads lead back to this style, which is indeed – as Tripathi puts it – “like savouring a beautiful-tasting wine”. After this, Javed Sanadi, who is himself classically trained, takes the dancers through a couple of swift, dazzling routines that will later be re-choreographed on the British cast. Despite the greater attack of the more modern style, the movements retain the old qualities of playful eloquence, of sensual engagement with the spectator. The cast of Wah! Wah! Girls are actors, first and foremost, and inevitably the dancing in the show will be more about capturing a feel, an atmosphere, than about technical know-how.

Tripathi describes the process of “getting the vocabulary into their bodies”, something that has been hard, given just four weeks’ rehearsal, but also intensely enjoyable. “Because they are actors, when they clock what you are talking about, it’s there. I just had to hack it through without breaking their confidence.

“And so much of it is about the vibrancy of the face – that’s pure Bollywood. I knew that it was a tough terrain we were treading on, trying to find people who could act and sing and dance.

But what we were looking for was a little madness and hunger in the way that they danced. An authenticity.”

In the rehearsal hall at Clapham, south London, the cast go through their final number, best described as a Bollywood rap. Their unified voices sound alive with passion but also with a relaxed, very British kind of humour. This, indeed, is achieving what Sanadi describes as the aim of the show: “Bollywood with essence of London”.

Key to the enterprise is director Emma Rice, of the acclaimed theatre company Kneehigh. Tripathi says: “We all grew up watching Bollywood. It is part of our lives. Emma didn’t know the world in that way – so the clichés of interpretation could be avoided.”

It seems apt, in fact, that Theatre Royal Stratford East (along with Sadler’s Wells and Kneehigh) is one of the producers of this show, because it feels very much like something that Joan Littlewood might have conceived, had she been creating theatre in London today.

As for that bizarre title – what exactly does it mean? “Wah,” says Tripathi, “is a very old word. It dates back to the Mughals. It’s an expression, a sort of 'wow’, to show that you appreciate whatever you are savouring. It’s what you say when your senses have been gratified.” Here’s hoping.

At the Curve, Leicester (0116 242 3595) May 16-19, and previewing at the Peacock Theatre, London WC2 (0844 412 4300) from May 24.